The Fussy Eye: Ode to Globo

No love for the hulking edifice at Greg Kucera?

Sitting unsold up in the loft is poor Globo—a seven-foot-high remnant from Mark Calderon's fall show. With a core of Styrofoam and cement, sheathed in pimpled lead, the hulking edifice doesn't inspire much love. The bulbous tower is suggestive of old fertility rites and forgotten pagan festivals. It's like a de-thorned, petrified cactus, or something left behind by aliens, or a rivet-studded missile prepared for flight. Tabletop-sized, it would make a nice paperweight, or a pleasant massage toy to roll under your bare arch. But mass and scale work against Globo: It suggests something excavated from an archaeological site, like Kubrick's slab in 2001—an edifice left by an extinct tribe with a language no one can understand. Unless Globo is that language, its Rosetta stone, its legacy. Though created this year, Globo has the implacable patience of a messenger (or message) that's waited millennia to be unearthed, but not understood. Calderon, a 30-year veteran of the local art scene, makes plenty of smaller sculptures and paintings that can be easily absorbed into a room, but Globo refuses to be domesticated. Like Stonehenge, it seems an ancient, animist presence that will outlast any gallery, museum, or collector. Globo doesn't need you. The price? Only $20,000. Or make your best offer. Globo can wait.